Shattered into Light: Addiction

Breakdowns, demonic attachment, addiction, psychotic episodes ranging from six hours to five days in length, one hallucination, one poltergeist, two evictions, £40k of debt, homelessness, the loss of every friend and most of her family, the loss of all the mementos she had of her mother and the inability to be there when she died, the loss of five or six jobs, big and little accidents and trips to A&E, passing out in the middle of the day in public, suicide attempts, innumerable nasty and embarrassing panic attacks, hyperventilation, depression, medication, the odd cigarette, lots of public humiliation, loss of bodily functions and loss of self-worth.

That was her life for roughly five and a half years. Most of it was caustic, steadfast, unrelenting, painful, shameful, and uncomfortable – although, once she knew what was happening, the psychosis became interesting. She drank her mother’s life insurance and did the same to her salary, around £550 a month. Hand in hand with the wine, there came a gain of almost 8st in weight, so it was lucky she was skinny to begin with.

People fell away from her as soon as she stopped being happy, uncomplaining, and demure – when she simply did not have the mental strength and energy to fake it 'till she made it. The mad, bleak, depressing person they met when she found herself in trouble was too much and they found it scary. It was unexpected, and they did not know what to do to help, so they didn’t. For them, the problem – her – disappeared from their lives when she stopped drip-feeding them titbits.

Imagine you’re at a desk in an office – she worked there. It’s 10 a.m., and there are 150 people sat at their workstations, spread out across the sixth-floor, open-plan space. Two of these people sit either side of her, and the one on her left is her boss. Since waking up at 7 a.m., 80 miles away at her home on the Kent coast, she spent the morning traveling to work – this involved a 15-minute walk down a pretty residential lane and a walk down a shoddy alleyway that had permanent puddles.

At the station, she waited for her train, the 7.46 a.m. that took her into London to arrive at Blackfriars at about 9.30 a.m. She had time to stroll by the river and relax until she made her way to the office to start work at 10 a.m. She took the lift to floor six – or floor 12 if she fancied something from the canteen – and then made her way to the toilets, where she locked herself in a cubicle. She took a seat (as you would), then took a water bottle from her handbag and an unopened bottle of wine. She topped up the water bottle. There was only a little bit of wine left in it because she had been swigging from it since she left the house at 7.20 a.m. In fact, she had gone through the best part of a bottle of red since she woke up – taking it slow, as it was a workday.

The water bottle would sit by her feet throughout the day as she clicked and scrolled, typed, emailed, and browsed. She took little sips from her special bottle when no one was watching. She bought more wine on her lunch break from one of the two supermarkets close by and topped up her water bottle some more when she got back to the office. Sometimes, if the weather was nice, she would buy a ‘gin in a tin’ from M&S and drink it as she walked by the river. By 4 p.m., she was too paranoid to drink from the little bottle at her desk anymore – surely someone could smell the booze on her by now? She waited, frustrated and thinking only of when she would be able to take the next sip, clock-watching until 6 p.m. when she could leave and power-walk to the station to catch her 6.18 p.m. train, which arrived just as she did at London Bridge.

She found a seat and settled in for the hour-forty-five journey home. More sipping from the bottle – more regularly now, since she didn’t have to worry about colleagues sniffing booze on her breath or the smell escaping from her sweat. A detour to the supermarket on the way home to buy three more bottles of wine – she was a regular sight there, of course – two for tonight, one for tomorrow morning. The next day, she realized the empty wine bottles were building up a bit in her handbag, so that morning when she locked herself in the cubicle, she decided to leave an empty bottle tucked behind the toilet to get rid of it. This became a habit; every couple of days or so, she got rid of her bottle in this way, until one of her colleagues commented on having seen an empty bottle of wine sitting on the floor in one of the cubicles when she arrived for work at 10 a.m. ‘Sad,’ someone said, ‘that someone feels so bad that they have to do that.’

She came in one day having wildly misjudged her consumption that morning. Very drunk, she arrived at her desk before making an excuse and taking the lift down to the basement where she knew there were beds, the unmanned sick bay – a strange area, but she was going to pass out if she didn’t find somewhere. So, she went to the sick bay, picked a bed, lay down, and blacked out. Her boss, who had shown her the area with the beds when she first started and had been the most kind, supportive, and understanding boss she had ever had, found her about an hour later.

Her boss was crying, saying she was taking advantage of her, that she had come in drunk, stinking of booze and slurring her words. She did not remember speaking to her boss at all when she arrived, so she didn’t know what she had slurred to her. She apologized as best she could in that state, and her boss sent her home. The 10-minute walk to the train station she did every day was now overwhelming. She could not find her way; she got lost. She stopped to sleep in a small park, got up, fell over twice, and decided to sit down in a doorway and make an attempt at composing herself. After a few minutes, she got up, hailed a taxi to take her the short distance to the train station, and went home.